CONFIDENCE MAN

This is a story about a canary yellow Pontiac LeMans, how I courted the woman who would become my wife and, most important, why Northwestern Memorial decided to build a $580-million hospital.

It's about Gary A. Mecklenburg, a boy from Glen Ellyn who grasped early in life how the world works. (Hint: It's mostly about people.)

Tribune readers may not know that much about Mecklenburg. Anonymity is an occupational hazard among hospital administrators. They work behind the scenes so the public will know about their institution's star surgeons, prize-winning medical researchers and check-writing benefactors.

So it was unusual last week when the news photogs and TV crews kept catching Mecklenburg as he opened doors, shook hands and otherwise greeted VIPs to the ceremonial completion of what has been, for several years running, the largest privately funded construction project in the state of Illinois. One three-head news photo depicted a clapping First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, a smiling Mayor Richard Daley and a clapping-and-smiling hospital executive (unidentified) in a dark business suit. That was Mecklenburg, in his 14th year as president and chief executive officer of Northwestern Memorial.

We were friends in college. More on that later.

The big thing now is the new building on East Ontario Street, which at once makes Northwestern Memorial the premier hospital facility in Chicago if not the entire nation. News coverage has dwelled on the digitized X-rays, the high-tech patient beds and even the low-tech pullout bunks for overnight family stays. The place is at once overwhelming and reassuring. Overwhelming because of its 2 million square feet of space and its hard-wired electronic bells and whistles. Reassuring because everywhere you look there are windows with lake views, woodwork and cheery paintings celebrating life in Chicago and life in general. The place gives new meaning to the expression "healing arts."

What wows me, though, is that Gary Mecklenburg and his governing board had the audacity to build this thing in the first place.

A decade ago, when key decisions were made, it already was obvious that insurance plans were out to squeeze hospitals until every unnecessary nickel was wrung from their budgets. Corporate America had declared war on the rising cost of health insurance, and its weapon of choice, HMOs, demanded shorter hospital stays and deeper discounts. Congress, out to balance the budget, targeted Medicare. No more extra payments to academic medical centers like Northwestern for clinical research and doctor training.

Throw this cautionary stuff at Mecklenburg, however, and he throws it back, cheerfully, point by point.

The new hospital, he explains, is designed for these changes, not in spite of them. "Only 20 percent of the new building is beds," he points out. More than half is dedicated to outpatient care--enough to handle a million ambulatory visits a year. Indeed, since Mecklenburg took over in 1985 the average in-patient length of stay has been cut nearly in half, to 4.1 days, which helps explain why per-patient "cost of care" also has been falling. The hospital now has service contracts with 55 insurance plans, which says something about value received.

"Gary is a strategic thinker," said Charles Brumback, who chaired the hospital's board when the project was conceived. "He understood that the future of health care was not going to be like the past."

Tour the building with Mecklenburg and that which seems extravagant gets explained as cost-efficient. All private rooms? Each with it's own foot-pedal sink? (Less stress, quicker recuperation times, more hand-washing, fewer infections . . . )

By the time Mecklenburg delivers his favorite line ("Quality care is cost-efficient care") even this MBA-phobic writer is primed to believe.

Then those college memories come pouring back.

This was the guy who showed up in my family's living room one summer evening 33 years ago wearing a three-piece, worsted-wool suit complete with watch fob. He proceeded to convince my mother that "Johnny" should bring an umbrella to Northwestern, because it gets rainy, and join his fraternity, because it gets lonely.

Later I did join that fraternity and helped elect Mecklenburg its president. And not just because of those Friday afternoon runs he'd make in that hot yellow Pontiac of his. To Howard Street in Chicago he'd go, to purchase certain undergraduate necessities that were not yet legalized in Evanston. No, it was because Gary Mecklenburg is a natural leader who takes a sincere interest in others. His idea of hell-week hazing was to send the pledges to scrub floors at what was, back then, Evanston's blacks-only hospital. He helped us pick the right courses, avoid the wrong off-campus dives and, in my case, cultivate some badly needed savoir-faire.

(No honey, that wasn't my idea, shortly after we met, going to that little French restaurant on Clark Street called Michelle's. The single, long-stem rose? The bottle of new Beaujolais? It was all Gary. He scripted everything.)

Part of his act is artifice, to be sure. He knows appearances count, whether pitching a freshman or a hospital trustee.

But he has a special gift, this Mr. Mecklenburg, for bringing people together and making good things happen.